Music
Venice Monteverdi
Bologna Blood Orange
Florence & Turin Sade
These are the musicians that accompanied the many hours spent alone in various near-empty hotel rooms and on otherwise mundane walks to the grocer in each city. Random things led me towards these artists. For example I saw a commercial for a film in black and white on the French Arte television channel that had a Nina Simone song playing in the background. Allured by the warmth of her piano, I listened specifically to the Nina Simone Sings the Blues album as I passed through a chilly Paris. While in Florence, I heard a muffled version of Sade's 'Like a Tattoo' coming from behind the closed doors of a house. I stopped for a minute and recorded the hazy sound on my phone, and then kept listening to the recording for the rest of my time in the city.
Venice was definitely the most pleasurable city in terms of audio. The absence of cars and traffic increased the audibility of the sound of water dripping from pipes into canals, church bells echoing down tight passages, live jazz coming from bars, and footsteps heard from around corners. Every sound was blended into a highly pleasurable auditory collage. One afternoon, just around the corner from San Marco, I heard a recording of Vivaldi playing out into the piazza from an old church. Upon further inspection I discovered that the church was actually a museum dedicated to Vivaldi's work. I went inside, and wasn't necessarily enamoured by the modest collection of instruments on display, but did discover that a Baroque composer I love, Baldassare Galuppi, is buried there. Music history was everywhere in Venice. At the basilica of San Marco, I was struck by the thought that Claudio Monteverdi was once the master of the chapel choir there. From 1613 until his death in 1647, the basilica was where the last of his liturgical music was composed. On my last morning in Venice I traipsed through the basilica with other tourists, pulling myself up its steep stairwells and gazing up at its glistening gold domed ceiling. The extent to which the atmosphere and acoustics of the church formed this music became apparent upon entering. Last year, in Melbourne, I saw Pinchgut Opera perform Monteverdi concertinos from his time at San Marco. The music was so incredibly nuanced, filled with so much emotion that effortlessly touched my soul. The voices were texturally rich and beautiful, as is the basilica itself.
At Fondazione Querini Stampalia, a housemuseum that contains a pretty big collection of Baroque paintings, there's a walled garden designed by architect Carlo Scarpa. The main component of Scarpa's design is a fountain that runs the length of a lawn. Water runs down from a larger square pond into a slimmer pond and then empties through intricate steel spouts into gold leaf embellished dishes. Scarpa's design holds deep reverence for the sound of running water. In this garden, every other sound in the city stops. All you hear is water as it trickles and falls from level-to-level. It seemed to be the pinnacle of everything I had heard in Venice, as though all noise had been distilled down to focus on the most relevant and important sound to the experience of the city. It was an exquisite and highly meditative experience.
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| A still from a video I took in Venice while returning to my hotel after dinner. Pretty sure I was listening to Leonard Cohen at the time |